Wessex Tales contained only five stories (‘The Three Strangers’, ‘The Withered Arm’, ‘Fellow-Townsmen’, ‘Interlopers at the Knap’, and ‘The Distracted Preacher’) all published first in periodicals. For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added ”An Imaginative Woman,” but in 1912 moved this to another collection, Life’s Little Ironies, while at the same time transferring two stories – ”A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” and ”The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” – from Life’s Little Ironies to Wessex Tales.